Coincidence Analysis of Key Words and MeSH Terms in the Journal of The Korean Society of Emergency Medicine

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: Keywords describe the medical concepts of articles in the medical literature. They provide many benefits to those creating databases, to indexers who are cross-indexing scientific articles, and to users by providing easy access to sources. Hence, it is important for authors to choose keywords that are accurate and that correspond to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). The objectives of this study were to investigate whether English keywords used in the Journal of the Korean Society of Emergency Medicine (KJEM) coincide with MeSH terms, and to understand the major errors in MeSH term selection. METHODS: To analyze how accurately authors of KJEM use MeSH terms, keywords provided by authors (author terms) were compared with terms listed in the corresponding MeSH browser. We analyzed keywords from 356 articles of the KJEM that were published between 2005 and 2006 and between 2008 and 2009. We investigated frequently used keywords and what percentage of keywords agree with MeSH terms using the MeSH browser. RESULTS: A total of 1,153 author terms were used as keywords in the 356 KJEM articles. There were on average 5.91 authors and 3.24 keywords per article. The keywords that appeared most frequently (in descending order) were cardiac arrest, emergency medical services, ultrasonography, emergency department (medicine), and cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The number of terms in precise agreement with MeSH headings was 584 (50.7%); 260 terms (22.5%) were not found in the MeSH browser;60 terms (5.2%) had only a trivial difference from MeSH terms; 203 terms (17.6%) including entry terms, and 46 terms (4.0%) matched MeSH subheadings. CONCLUSION: Many keywords used in the KJEM did not agree with MeSH terms. We conclude that medical authors should be educated in the proper use of MeSH terms in their research and subsequent publication.